Gavin Bryars' cantata, The War in Heaven, was commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which gave the first performance in 1993. Since then it has only been heard once, at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam in 2011, the source of this recording. Though large-scale contemporary choral pieces are never the easiest works to programme, it's hard to see why Bryars' work has been neglected; it's a thoughtful and worthwhile piece, neither especially dramatic nor poetically beautiful, but with a cumulative intensity that creates something more lasting than the sum of its parts.

There are two sharply contrasted texts. The chorus sing a setting of lines from Genesis A, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon paraphrase of the first book of the Bible sometimes attributed to the Northumbrian poet Caedmon, which describe the casting out of rebellious angels from heaven, while the soloists, soprano (Anja-Nina Bahrmann) and male alto (Maarten Engeltjes), share a monologue by the US playwright Sam Shepard about a very different kind of fallen angel. The contrast works well, and Bryars dovetails the texts in such a way that their relationship is constantly shifting, with first one, then the other in the foreground, and the orchestra providing understated support.

At one point, the orchestral writing in The War in Heaven seems to allude to Parsifal, and Wagner also seems to lurk in the background of the Epilogue from G, the work that completes the disc. G, Being the Confession and Last Testament of Johannes Gensfleisch also known as Gutenberg, Master Printer, formerly of Strasbourg and Mainz, to give it its full title, was the opera that Bryars composed in 2002 to mark the 600th anniversary of the birth of the man who is credited with the invention of printing. The epilogue of the opera, set in the present day with the elderly Gutenberg musing on his achievement and asking to be left in peace now that the age of printing has passed, is conceived like a solo cantata for bass-baritone (Hans-Otto Weiss), accompanied by strings and off-stage brass; it seems musically self-sufficient, and striking in its sombre, reflective way.